Researcher sees nomadic hurdles in modern political systems

By Ilan Greenberg / NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE , ALMATY

Every summer for the past eight years, Michael Frachetti has come to the desert steppe that rolls like endless yellow waves across Kazakhstan searching for evidence of a vast, connected nomadic society.

With each new excavation, Frachetti, an archeologist at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, hopes to complicate received notions of the lives and societies of the nomads who once thrived in this region.

Frachetti's work concerns Bronze Age nomads, and his scholarship is aimed purely at a historical understanding of how a pre-literate society functioned more than 3,000 years ago. But his work coincides with a geopolitical reality that has important implications for US foreign policymakers: many of the countries that most trouble the West -- such as Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia -- have government institutions that reflect a nomadic past.

"Take Afghanistan, where politics are much more dispersed," said Frachetti, while sitting in an upscale Almaty cafe last month, a few days before trekking to the Saryesik-Atyrau Desert to conduct that remote area's first archeological survey.

"I think some of our foreign policy complications derive from our inability to locate a nomadic dynamic within contemporary political structures," he said.

Recent investigations have challenged long-held views of nomadic culture as purely transient, with little impact on the urban, sophisticated societies that emerged later.

Instead, scientists like Frachetti are discovering that nomadic cultures are flexible, switching between transient and more sedentary ways of life, and assimilating and inventing new ideas and technologies. Nomads created durable political cultures that still influence the way these countries interact with outsiders or negotiate internal power struggles.

While the view that tribe and clan -- the basic building blocks of nomadic, or semi-transient societies -- influence the contemporary politics of some countries is nothing new, specialists in nomadic studies argue that policymakers have overlooked important "cultural intelligence," such as family relationships, when analyzing governments that grew out of tribal traditions.

"Families, tribes these are the things that matter here," said Oraz Jandosov, cochairman of a Kazakhstan opposition political party. "Foreigners talk about these things, but it's only talk. They don't understand them."

Countries like Iraq and Afghanistan may take on the trappings of modern, Western nation-states, with parliaments, justice departments and other governmental agencies, researchers say. But politics are still driven by the customs and institutions of nomadism, in which political disputes were settled at the level of family, clan and tribe.

"In and of itself you can't graft what happened two thousand years ago and say that's what it is today, but it helps to understand how these societies have found successful strategies and how they respond to outside forces," Frachetti said. "By not exploring the depth to which nomadic populations have contributed to local political systems, we are naive to an important aspect of the social fabric of parts of the Near East and Central Asia."

The US military has learned the importance of tribes in Iraq, as evidenced by its policy of arming Sunni Arab tribal chiefs in Anbar province to fight the leading insurgent group there, al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia.